The present invention relates to a vending system in a hotel or the like which permits a guest to buy an article from a vending machine such as a refrigerator installed in his room without the use of coins.
In hotels or the like, when a guest checks out a hotel employee checks a refrigerator in the guest's room to find out the articles sold to the guest during his stay so that this sales system is economical from a standpoint of savings in labor. To overcome this problem, vending machines are installed in some hotels, but this sales system is inconvenient to guests because they must carry coins with them and must frequently ask for change in small coins.
To overcome these problems, there has been invented and demonstrated a sales or vending system in which a data transmission line is established to connect refrigerators or vending machines installed in guest rooms and other places with an accounting machine or the like in a front desk so that every time an article is sold, the signal representative of the article sold may be transmitted to the accounting machine. However this system has the defect that it cannot be readily installed in the existing hotels or the like because of the wiring problem of the data transmission lines.